Ella Langley is on the verge of making Billboard history with “Choosin’ Texas” — a song whose unlikely origin involves Miranda Lambert, a kangaroo and a story about getting pulled over by a cop.
The 27-year-old country star — whose main axe is a Gibson SJ-200 acoustic — has emerged as one of 2026’s breakout acts. Five tracks from her fourth album, Dandelion, have surpassed 100 million streams on Spotify alone, helping the singer-songwriter from Hope Hull, Alabama, connect with a huge audience.
But “Choosin’ Texas” has left the rest in the dust, amassing more than 694 million Spotify streams and climbing to the top of the Billboard Hot 100.
Released in October 2025 as the lead single from Dandelion, the song didn’t reach No. 1 until February. It hasn’t budged since, and this week it is expected to notch its 23rd week at the summit — breaking a record held by Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You.”
Carey’s festive smash has spent 22 weeks at number one since first reaching the top in 2019. The achievement helped cement her status as the “Queen of Christmas,” and for the past seven years, her 22-week run has been the benchmark Langley is now poised to surpass.
“Choosin’ Texas,” meanwhile, is a country song in the classic tradition of heartbreak and romantic rejection, told from the perspective of a jilted lover. And its inspiration is about as far removed from the Billboard Hot 100 as you can imagine.
“I wrote it with one of my favorite artists, Miranda Lambert,” Langley told iHeartCountry in April. Luke Dick and Joybeth Taylor also receive writing credits on the hit.
“We were at a writer’s retreat, and she [Lambert] was telling me this story of how she had a kangaroo in her passenger seat,” Langley explains. “She got pulled over, and the cop was like, ‘Oh, you have Texas plates.’ And I said, ‘Well, she’s from Texas, I can tell.’
“We all latched onto that story of ‘he picked the other girl.’ We’ve all had a crush at one time who was more into someone else.”
The kangaroo, it turns out, belongs to Lambert, making the song’s origin story even more unusual. The animal’s name has never been publicly revealed, but its appearance at a writer’s retreat helped inspire a song that is now on the verge of surpassing one of Mariah Carey’s most enduring chart records.
Nearly a year after its release, “Choosin’ Texas” shows no sign of slowing down. If it reaches 23 weeks at number one this week as expected, Langley will have a new Billboard record — thanks, in part, to a kangaroo.
In related news, the undisputed queen of country, Dolly Parton, was recently honored at the Emmys, while another fast-rising country star has opened up about making a fan out of Bob Dylan.
